


maps wont show us where we're going

by thisstableground



Series: maps [1]
Category: Do No Harm (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Post-Series, Violence, aw shit emotional catharsis, like a make it sad then start to fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-13 07:32:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10509198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: Post-finale. Ruben lives, has a hell of lot to cope with, and might even be okay one day way, way in the future.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [a:n: WELL guess i’m just here writing fic about this show that i’ve only even seen trick-please’s LMM supercut of and then i got way too attached to this poor sad dude. i cannot stress enough that i know nothing of the show outside Ruben. not quite a fix-it, but something on the route towards that (with a major detour beforehand).]
> 
>  
> 
> [WARNINGS: this is set after the finale, and Ruben survives, but Ian did a number on him. PTSD, suicidal ideation (not acted on), violence (which, while not quite overt sexual violence, definitely shares enough elements that might hit too close to home in that area for some people)
> 
> title is from 'dear confessor' by immaculate machine]

_Jamaica, week 1._

He ends up naked on the doorstep of a free clinic. It’s shabby on the outside, clearly underfunded, but clean and professional inside. They fix up the deep latticework of lacerations down his arms and down his chest. The nurse speaks in a low and calming tone, doesn’t ask him what happened, does ask if he wants to contact the police, if he needs a rape kit. No, and no.

They give him a sandwich that he doesn’t eat, a glass of orange juice that he gulps down desperately. They give him a starchy, scratchy shirt and a spare pair of scrubs pants and there’s no free beds. There’s no offer of therapy, none of the resources needed for dealing with something this fucked up, but the nurse takes the time to bring him a packet of salted crackers when she sees him picking listlessly at the sandwich and he appreciates that gesture more than it probably warrants. When he’s all sewn together and only barely trembling, the nurse shuffles him to a seat in the waiting room and tells him that he’s discharged whenever, but he can take as long as he needs.  


Ruben needs a lifetime, but time moves strange in places like this anyway, and he’s always found something comforting in clinical white walls. Apart from that and the antiseptic scent, its nothing like his lab and nothing like his hospital here.

Good.

Ian has a surgeon’s muscle memory and knew how deep to cut and knew how to hurt him and hurt him without ever letting him pass out, without letting him die. Ian kept him all night and did whatever the hell he wanted, dropped him at the clinic just before dawn and gave a two-finger mock-salute as he drove away. Ian thought that he could make a patchwork harlequin of Ruben and that the threat of being torn apart at his stitched-up seams would be the thing to stop him from going back to America.

He breathes in antiseptic and thinks:

_I’m never gonna be forcibly hooked up to a dialysis machine again._

_I’m never gonna have to jump through a plate glass window again_

_I’m never gonna say_ I can’t _and_ I don’t want to _and_ I shouldn’t _and_ I won’t _and then have to do it anyway, to be a lackey for Ian and his club drugs or for Jason and his endless search for a cure. Jason, Ian, Ian, Jason, who gives a shit who’s wearing the face, because it’s Ruben that ends up fucked either way._

It’s Ruben now in a free hospital run-down waiting room in Jamaica, where the walls are clinical white and nobody’s asking him to do anything.

 _“I’m doing you a big favor, Rubes, I’m letting you live, but you gotta stick to our deal, okay? You can live but you can’t ever come back home.”_  
  
“I don’t _want_ to,” Ruben thinks savagely, victoriously, and there’s nobody there to force him.

Four hours later the nurse who sewed him up passes through the waiting room at the end of her shift, and double-takes at the figure slumped in a hard plastic seat.

“Hon, you’re free to go whenever you want, you know that?”

“Yeah, I know,’ he says, and he doesn’t move until five hours later when the clinic closes.

He has nowhere to sleep. That doesn’t matter because he wouldn’t sleep anyway. He sits on the beach all night and now there’s sand in his bandages, which is agonising but in a way that sort of seems like it’s happening to someone else’s body while he’s just along for the ride.

 

***

 

_Jamaica, week 2._

There’s a job going for a night cleaner in a shitty barely-a-hotel-ish place, the kind that costs a pittance per night and where people stay for months because it's cheaper than renting proper. It barely pays a wage, and makes up for that by offering room and board and one square meal a day. Sounds kinda sketchy, but Ruben’s been sleeping on the beach and relying on generous strangers and washing in basins in public toilets and scavenging in garbage cans out the back of the little row of cafes on the seafront, so sketchy is probably about the right level for him.   
  
The hotel owner looks to be about a billion years old and doesn’t seem to give one single damn that Ruben is mummified from the waist up in dirty tattered bandages, wearing scrub pants and is blatantly living rough. When he sheepishly explains that he knows he doesn’t look like an ideal employee but these are the only clothes he has, she tells him to wait and disappears creakingly slow up the stairs. She comes back with a huge plastic trash bag full of what turns out to be her late husband’s clothes.

He pulls out a pair of jeans, touches the bleached-out patches of the knees where years of scuffing and stretching has left the denim pale and soft, weathered but untorn. The kindness of this random stranger hits with a sharpness in his chest like a knife, like parallel line after parallel line with a blade and he’s lying stripped on a table and he’s - no, no, because he can feel the bandage fibers sticking to his scabbed-over wounds and the label in his shirt is prickling on his neck and oh, where he actually is right now is sat on a hotel floor crying into a pair of musty old dead guy jeans.

He was a fucking doctor once. He was a chemist once.

“I won’t,” he gasps, not knowing what he’s referring to but knowing that he’s never meant anything as hard as he means those words. “I _won’t_.”  


The hotel owner is holding one of his hands in both of hers, trying to soothe him. The touch makes him want to fight or run or die -

_“Fight if you want, Rubes, but I think we both know which one of us is stronger, or have you forgotten our little incident in the hospital basement?”_

\- but her hands are too small and withered and weak and kind to be afraid of. She whispers ‘shh, I know, I know’. She doesn’t know at all, her ancient voice sounds like six rattlesnakes having a bar fight, she’s given him her dead husband’s clothes.

Ruben wails.

It’s hands-down the worst job interview he’s ever given, including that one time just out of college where he was so nervous he threw up on the interviewer. He gets the position anyway.

 

***

 

 _Jamaica, week 3._  
  
Ruben sleeps fitfully and tends to just nap during the day, because he works till 3AM and because he knows Ian won’t be awake, even though Ian isn't here. Only feels himself relax when it hits 8:25 in the morning, even though he doesn’t know what time it is stateside.

The red flashing numbers of his digital clock are permanently crowding his vision now, blinking in front of his eyes no matter where he stands. He reaches a hand out to touch them then remembers that he’s just hallucinating. He’s sleep deprived, he’s living off his one employee-bonus meal a day and can’t always bring himself to face even that.

Does Ian show up according to local time or is he always on Eastern?

Math exam question: if Jason leaves Eastern and crosses timezone boundaries into Central at precisely 8:25 ET, will it be Jason or Ian who comes along to ruin Ruben’s life that day?

Answer: does it even make a fucking difference? Maybe it was just Jason the whole time, Ruben’s brain suggests acidly. Maybe Jason just made the whole fucking thing up. Maybe there is no Ian.  
  
But Ian kind of ruined Jason’s life too, and what possible reason would he have to even pull that kind of shit anyway?

But none of it really makes sense and never did.  
  
Could it have been Jason the whole time? Ruben thought they were friends.  
  
_“I thought we bonded, Rubes, I thought we connected on our night out with your wonder drug and maybe we could get something good going. Turns out Jason just has to snap his fingers and you’re willing to kill me, for_ ** _him_** _? You think he’d ever be willing to kill for you? You think he’ll wake up tomorrow, realise what I’ve done to you, do the right thing and stop both of us for good? You think you’re anything more than a quick brain and a lab full of shiny toys to him?”_

_Were_ they friends?

Jason was scared when he found Ruben hooked up to the dialysis machine, punctured and painted into writing over the wall. Ruben had flinched away because it was the same face, the same person, but Jason looked scared like Ian never did, and his hands fumbled a little on the straps as he unhooked Ruben from the machine.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he’d said. He was worried, shaken. Because Ruben was his friend.

…and because if he hadn’t switched back and Ruben had just died in that basement, it was _Jason’_ s hand that had smeared a message in blood on the wall, _his_ fingerprints all over the place, _his_ chance at a cure lost -

“Nope!” says Ruben loudly. “Nope, shut the fuck up.”

Jason who took the untested suppressant that made Ian seek Ruben out with a baseball bat, Jason that said “chain me to this radiator and then fix me no matter what you want to do” -

“Shut up!”

Jason who nearly killed a guy with Ruben’s drug and made Ruben pump artificial breath into the man’s dying lungs. Jason who said _I need you_ to someone who had never in his life been needed, because he knew it would get him what he wanted. Jason who asked Ruben to create miracles and then wouldn’t let him share it with the world, not for pride or money or helping anyone who isn’t Jason himself.

Not much of a friend, not a damn thing more than Jason’s reliable, pliable little chemist, and now not even much of a chemist any more. Ruben will never be a chemist again and Ruben will be forever crosshatched in thick white lines from wrist to navel.

“Please stop,” he sobs to himself.

_I can’t, I can’t, I can’t_ , comes the reply like drums in his head.

 

***  


 

Jamaica, week 4.  
  
He’s in a payphone booth at 4 in the morning, not dialing a number. Ian knows where he lived, where his family lives. His mom might be dead, maybe, and how would he ever find out? His mom almost definitely thinks _he’s_ dead. He didn't tell her where he was going - might be dumb enough to leave a paper trail right from his laptop to the airport, but still not quite that dumb.

For all the good it’s done him anyway. He’s in a payphone booth at four in the morning trying to imagine what it would feel like for your child to disappear into nothingness. Did they get out of town? Have they tried to find him? Did they find out he caught a flight and that he never picked up his bag at the other end? Surely they wouldn’t do anything about a grown man voluntarily catching an airplane. Would it be better if she thought he was dead, or just that she'd never speak to him again?

He cant imagine losing a child because he can’t even imagine having one in the first place, and maybe not ever now, because how the fuck would that work?  
  
Jason has a kid. Jason fucked over everything Ruben worked for his entire life and he's still the one who gets to go shape a the mind and soul of some fucked-up mini Jekyll-and-Hyde clone or whatever. Ruben never wants another person to touch him again, Ruben wants his mom, Ruben wants to get a notebook and do _something_ with his brain before it atrophies away from disuse even if he can only work in the theoretical now.

But there’s a kill cure just waiting in his head that he can’t forget, and he doesn’t trust his hands not to let it all bleed out onto paper, and what will happen after that? It’s too risky. He feels like Ian could just, like, crawl out of his eyes to see what he sees and then give him that fake-sad look, he can imagine it, he can see it right now.

“Oh, Rubes,” Ian sighs. Ruben fucking hates that nickname. “I thought we made a deal. I thought we had an agreement and you just went and broke that agreement, didn’t you? Thought you could get rid of me, find a way out of this? You know how that makes me feel?”  
  
“Um, a-a-angry?” Ruben stutters. Because he cant even hold a conversation with a figment of his goddamn imagination with a steady voice, talking to some invisible would-be murderer in an actual old-school phone booth like he’s Colin fucking Farrell or something.

“Not a-a-angry, Rubes,” says Ian. “Just…disappointed.”  
  
Ruben goes ice-cold terrified and he can feel not-real-Ian’s fingers on his chest. He jerks backwards so hard his head smacks into the battered plexiglass wall.

“Fucking _ow_ ,’ he says, infuriated with himself. He _knew_ that wasn’t real. This is bullshit. And how the fuck would Ian know what Ruben doodled in his notebooks? Why the fuck would he care what Ruben did just to pass the time? Ian’s not even in Jamaica any more, probably, maybe, hopefully.

Ruben’s in a payphone booth at four in the morning and he doesn’t call his mom and he’s not gonna go buy a notebook to write in. Just to be safe.

He checks behind him every five steps on the walk back, just to be safe.

At the hotel there’s a young woman on Ruben’s floor who’s been there for months before he even showed up, who pretty much lives there. She’s pacing the halls tonight, barefoot in a long peachy-orange robe and making soft, maternal sounds at the nearly-sleeping infant in her arms. Her smile is tired but sweet as Ruben passes her; he used to have a good smile himself, he knows, but his best attempts fall short these days. He tries anyway.  
  
“Long night?” the woman asks him. He never learnt her name. Seems like its probably too late to ask at this point, really.  
  
“For all three of us, I guess,” he says, indicating the baby.  
  
“He’s a stubborn thing, but I think he’s about given in now,” she says fondly, then casts a critical eye over Ruben’s slumped figure. “Maybe time for you to do the same, hm?”  
  
The way this is meant to go is that Ruben is meant to laugh and pretend like he’s turning in with a cheerful little comment, wait until the door closes before he breaks, so that everyone can maintain the facade of perpetual contentment on which society is founded. It’s pretty mortifying when instead his voice cracks and he hears himself saying “but I _can’t_.”  
  
She looks at him with all the compassion that wells up from someone deep in parental soothing mode, and it makes his heart hurt. He wants his mom.

“Here, you keep walking with him for a moment, I have something for you,” and she passes the goddamn baby to him. He takes it automatically and then freaks out as inwardly as possible when it registers with him what just happened. Oh, god, he can’t hold a _baby_ , he’ll ruin it.

“I-I-I shouldn’t-“ he says, absolutely terrified, and she just tuts at him and bustles off to her room. The baby grumbles restlessly so Ruben starts pacing and jiggling like he saw the woman doing a moment ago. The baby shoves its snotty face into Ruben’s shirt and falls straight asleep.

The young woman returns, expertly taking her sleeping child in one arm and handing a small paper bag to him with the other. Confused, he opens it: there’s yellow flowers and dried green leaves and a sweet, bright smell like a garden in spring.

“No promise that it will help you sleep,” she tells him, “But it at least might make for a more pleasant awake. One teaspoon. Hot water, but not boiling. Good night, Ruben.”  
  
Aw, shit, she knows _his_ name. Ruben nods tightly and retreats to his room with the paper bag held like a precious jewel in his hands. Hopefully she knows by instinct how grateful and how tired he is, because he sure as shit couldn’t open his mouth to tell her without bursting into tears.  
  
He doesn’t want to think about his mom, or the way the woman’s face held a whole universe of wonder as she kissed the top of her baby’s head, or the way that a small, sleeping weight felt on his still-healing chest.

Think about instead filling the tiny, cheap electric kettle in his room from the basin, direct every ounce of concentration into it. A quick search on his floor reveals a coffee-stained spoon that he wipes off on his shirt, and he’s got a chipped mug that he measures a spoonful of herbs into. The kettle is starting to rumble so he flicks it off before it reaches the boil, pours the tea and lets his face flush with the pretty-smelling steam.

It’s too hot to drink yet but he does anyway, and he doesn’t own a tea strainer so he gets a mouthful of damp foliage with every sip, and it tastes kind of like vaguely minty grass. It's no diazepam by any stretch of the imagination, doesn't knock him even halfway out, but it blunts the edges of his aching tiredness into something more like sleepy. He drifts along with the yellow-white flowers floating in their yellow-clear water. Before he knows it his mug is empty and the sun is rising high. It’s the first night in four weeks he hasn’t been wrecked with gutpunch sobbing.   
  
At some point in his spacing out, he’d dug an old biro pen out of the top drawer beside his bed and it’s resting in his limp fingers now. His breath stops, but he looks at the brown paper parcel of tea and he’s not written formulas, materials, theories, cures. Instead, there’s a corner of the paper now covered in a number of uneven biro flowers, with big round centres and lots of floppy petals.  
  
Ruben makes another cup.

 

***

 

_Jamaica, week 5._

Ruben cleans the empty parts of the hotel at night and wishes Ian had just finished what he fucking started, sometimes.

He cleans bathrooms and knows that if he shut the doors and the windows and poured _this_ ammonia and _this_ chlorine bleach down a toilet together the choking would be painful, but what isn’t painful these days?

_I shouldn’t_ , he tells himself, uncertainly. He only brings one cleaning product into the bathroom with him at a time, just in case.

He cleans windows and knows that the bright blue off-brand Windex would tear his insides apart if he just took the spray cap off and drank the whole thing down, but he’s already been torn apart and apart from the outside, so what’s one more for the road?

_I can’t_ , he says more assuredly than he feels, because he _could_ easily, he just _hasn’t._

He climbs ladders to change lightbulbs with one hand steadying himself against the sturdy, exposed beams, and knows where to find rope and how to kick the ladder out from under him so his neck breaks fast instead of slow strangulation.

 _I won’t_ he says, and then he says it again for good measure, and he doesn’t, at least not this time.

He takes a damp cloth and wipes it along the shelves under the reception desk, around the lockbox where he knows there’s a handgun, because Mrs Campbell who runs the hotel gave him the key to be used in case of emergencies. It hangs from a chain around his neck, and he twists it round one finger. He could get it over with in less than a minute.

_I don't want to_ , he says, and he doesn’t really believe that but he still feels giddy and proud saying it to himself. Lets the key drop back down below the borrowed shirt of Mr Campbell, not following in his poor dead footsteps just yet.

Next day, same routine.

And the next day, the same.

 

***

 

_Jamaica, week 6._

_Ian has a knife in his hand and a gun tucked in his back pocket just for insurance, and they’re in the middle of fuckoff nowhere, Jamaica.  
_

_“You gonna be good, Ruben? The right answer is yes.”_  
  
_“I don’t want to”, Ruben thinks, but “y-yes” is what he says._

_Ian makes Ruben take his clothes off and he wonders where this is going, if Ian’s going to - but it’s a power play, it’s symbolic. He just lets Ruben wait there splayed, lying on a rusted metal table in some disused warehouse, burning with the awareness of how incredibly vulnerable he is right now. Ian won't let him cover his face or close his eyes or wipe his tearstained cheeks. After uncountable minutes, hours, forever, Ian decides that even skin is too much shelter for him, tears it open and bares him that way too._

_Ian trails the tip of the knife down his chest lightly, sweetly, taking his time tracing out the lines of Ruben's body before he presses the blade down, always waiting for the pain to fade in one spot before he drags it so the sensations are all clear and discrete experiences that Ruben can’t zone out on. Ian strokes his hair and his chest and his collarbone with delicate touches while cooing poison at him and there’s nothing explicitly sexual about it, which Ruben thought would be a relief but turns out to just be unbearable in a different way. He wants to lean into the caresses to escape the knife, he’d rather have the knife forever than one more gentle, mocking touch._

There’s a hand on his shoulder when he wakes up screaming, there’s a deep male voice speaking softly to him, and his screams turn into sobs turn into begging, _I can’t, I won’t_ -

‘Hey, hey, it’s just me, Ruben, it’s me,’ says the person. Not Ian. Jason?   
  
No. Focus, this isn’t the first panic attack he’s had even before Jamaica, focus on the details. Wrong accent. Hand on his shoulder, not pale enough to be Jason, fan’s whirring in the background. No fan in the disused warehouse. Clothes, there’s fabric on his skin, he’s got clothes. It’s in the details, that’s how you get back to yourself.  
  
He locked the door, always locks the door and now there’s someone in his room.  
  
“Yeah, you were kinda yellin’ the whole building down, people were frettin’, so I let myself in with the master key. I’m sorry. Hey, are you with me?”  
  
Focus, there’s a face in front of him, dark and round and encircled with a ring of tight curls. Definitely not Ian. This is the hotel. The fan is nearly broken so it clicks while it spins. There’s a hand on his shoulder and it’s Marcus who works reception evening shifts, for room and board and one meal a day, just like Ruben. Marcus is going to live with family in America after the summer. Ruben can never live with his family in America again so he’s working here forever maybe, Ruben is wearing a long sleeved t shirt, he’s wearing oversized pajama pants, he’s wrapped in a blanket and it is hot as hell.

At his pleading gesture, Marcus passes him the trash bag of clothes he never got round to actually storing properly and Ruben pulls a thin sweater on, a flannel shirt over the top which he buttons right to the collar.

“You’re gonna get like, dangerously warm in that, you realise?”  
  
Ruben showers in increments these days, revealing and submerging one body part at a time, so he can keep as much covered as possible. Sometimes he just showers in his clothes. He hasn’t jerked off since being in Jamaica, threw up the one time he tried, maybe doesn’t want to try again ever.  
  
There’s layers of fabric and it’s fine, it’s safe. He pulls the flannel up over his eyes. There’s a lull and then he hears a click-whirr get closer, Marcus’ heavy treading boots and quiet clattering.  
  
“Well…look, you know where I am, bro. I’ll leave this here, if that makes you feel better.”

Metal clink, footsteps, door closes. Ruben shoots up immediately to lock it then takes stock of the room. The details are important.

Marcus has moved the fan as close to the bed as short cable allows. Marcus has put a glass of water by the side of his bed, and Marcus has left the master key on the table.  
  
That key will access any room in the hotel. It’s an awful lot of trust to place in the guy who’s just tumbled out of some grade-A next-level flashback and is wearing three shirts in Jamaican summertime. And nobody can get in his room now.  
  
The details are: on the side table, he’s got the only master key, because maybe it would make him feel safer, he’s got a fan by his bed so he can wear a sweater without overheating.  
  
In a drawer next to a carefully-folded empty paper bag is a new, mostly-full bag of what turned out to be chamomile and catnip tea, because maybe it would help his restless nights.  
  
He’s got clothes and more clothes to keep him covered, to keep him safe, he’s got a job, because he’s more than just a free source of chemistry knowledge or a guy thrown naked on the step of a free clinic like a bag of trash.  
  
On his arms and on his chest he’s got lines and lines where not long ago he was held together by thread, where he was painstakingly mended by someone working for basically nothing in a dingy square box of a med centre. Not some big-shot surgeon who _needs the drug right_ ** _now_** because none of the other neurosurgeons could maybe do the job instead, because _he’s_ gotta be the big hero in the operating theatre and _he’s_ gotta have the dramatic gestures and _he’ll_ never think once to ask hey, Ruben, how have you been doing since that one time someone wearing my face was this close to clubbing your skull in with a baseball bat? How are you doing since I used your brain and your body and your blood to play games with both sides of myself? Not that, just a tired, careful nurse with steady hands, putting back together what someone else had no right to take apart in the first place.

“ _You gonna be good, Ruben? The right answer is yes.”_

“No,” he says, “I won’t, actually.”

A little late now, of course, but there’s a rush of terrified excitement anyway.  
  
_“You can’t ever come back home.”_  
  
“If home is where you are then I don’t want to. I don’t _fucking_ want to.” He’s only whispering it, there’s part of him that thinks Ian - Jason? - Ian might know where he is and what he’s saying, might sidle up behind him like he did on the plane and -  
  
Ruben shakes the door handle to make sure it’s locked, checks inside the old wardrobe, checks under the bed. Nobody’s here, and he’s facing the door with his back almost to the wall, and nobody can get in.  
  
“I’m taking this sweater off, because it’s too _goddamn_ hot and this fan is a piece of shit,” he says, louder, almost normal speaking volume. “This is mine, you don’t have any input on this. You don’t get to take over this life too.”

There’s still the long-sleeve, and he puts the flannel right back on after divulging himself of the sweater, but he leaves the top two buttons undone.   
  
It’s something, at least.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [an: the tea that the young lady with the baby gave to ruben is in fact exactly what i drink as a high-strung insomniac and it’s chill as fuck.]
> 
> [come hang out at thisstableground on tumblr where i'm apparently very easily goaded into writing things like whatever this is]


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [a/n: assume that i know nothing about non-Ruben Do No Harm, and very little about Alligator Pond, Jamaica. so little in fact that i got the name wrong first time writing this, sorry Jamaica.
> 
> NOTE: consider this an AU from the point in the show where we see Ruben’s abandoned bag, because kiwisatsuma told me how the show ends and i neither like nor understand any of what happened, so i’ve elected to just ignore it. i’m sure you’re all just super distressed but i hope you can enjoy this anyway.
> 
> warnings from previous chapter still apply]

_Jamaica, week 7._   


Montego Bay had been his initial goal when he’d hurriedly booked a ticket and hotel back in America.The plan was to stay for a week, then hop on through a few places. Give it a month or so and he’d find a place to settle down and figure out his next steps, figure out how to get back home safe.

He’s in Alligator Pond now, a little fishing settlement God knows how far out from his original destination.

(It had taken hours for Ian to drive the clunky old rental car from the airport to the warehouse - Ruben in the back with the child safety locks activated so he couldn’t jump out, and all he did was plead.  
  
“Ian, come on, I swear, I promise, I’m not gonna-“

“Man, shut _up._ You’re getting boring,” Ian had said, switching on whatever ancient tape had been left in the car’s cassette deck. It blared scratchy melodies, drowning Ruben out.  
  
He probably should’ve thrown himself into the front seat, wrestled control of the wheel. Veer them off the road and hope he survived the crash. He probably should’ve kicked up a fuss at the airport, at the car rental, at the very first time Jason came into his life with his whole “hey do you want to participate in some high-risk questionable research for no reward” gimmick before any of this.  
  
Hindsight, right? All he did was beg from the backseat, and then when the music was too loud and it seemed too pointless, all he did was listen to unknown jazz and the hiss of deteriorating tape. Side one, side two. Ten songs on each side. Each side replayed three times.)  
  
If anyone was looking for him in Montego, they were gonna be disappointed. After more than six weeks, though, he figured they'd probably stopped.

 

***

  

_Jamaica, week 8._  
  
His brain doesn’t work any more. This realisation comes when he’s trying to adjust his budget to allow for new shoes.

The job at the hotel pays some cash, but barely. He doesn’t have many outgoings, accommodation is part of the employment package so no bills, no rent. Only one meal a day provided at work, but he struggles to manage much more than a sandwich at lunch and he never eats breakfast any more anyway, so food doesn’t take up much. He uses his shampoo dual-purpose as body wash and dilutes it further and further as the bottle empties. Toothpaste, because there’s some things he won’t go without. He goes out for coffee sometimes, it makes him feel human to sit quietly in the corner of a cafe instead of spending all day working and living in the same building, but he’s hardly talking Starbucks extortion here.

Clothes don’t really factor in. The late Mr Campbell’s hand-me-downs serve their purpose. He can fix the occasional lost button or small tear, been able to do that since he was a teenager.   
  
There’ve been three or four times when Marcus from reception has passed him a small bag of clothes with a shrug and a “guest left these behind, you want?”  
  
He’s noticed that some of the items in these bags seem familiar. A couple of big, baggy lightweight sweaters he’s sure he’s seen on Cleo, the woman from his floor with the baby, with the tea (he finally learnt her name last week). The brightly striped overshirts that Marcus himself tends to favor. Various things he’s seen on recurring guests who come and go and talk to him sometimes, staying for a few days every week, travelling who knows where in between. Never a t-shirt. Never a v-neck.  
  
He doesn’t know how to tell them he knows their game, too touched by the thought and too aware of his circumstances to prickle at the idea of charity. Lots of people round here don’t have very much. They share what they can when someone needs, or else nobody would ever manage. Ruben has so little to offer: he hopes one day he can balance the scales.  
  
But, _shoes_. Currently he’s rocking a ragged old pair of fake Converse left behind by Mrs Campbell’s son, long grown up and flown away. The fabric’s coming unstuck from the sole a little more each day, and they’re a size too big so they slip around uncomfortably, leaving him blistered after working 9pm to 3am. Shoes are the kind of thing that don't get passed among people as much as clothes or kid’s toys: you wear them to death and hope you can afford new ones before the first pair literally fall apart.

Once, he could drop $50 on new sneakers just because he wanted them. Now he’s scraping together change week by week just to find something that fits from the little second-hand stall at the market on Saturdays, something that’ll probably last only just long enough for him to have piled together enough to start the same process over.

Once he created brand new drugs for completely unprecedented conditions on the side while still doing his day job. He’d mentally calculate dosages, equations, measurements in line at the grocery store, vast strings of numbers he could keep in his head til he got back to the lab to put them to work.

Now he’s sat in a cafe, trying to figure out a basic income-outgoing sum, and the numbers he’s scribbled on a napkin swim confusingly. Somewhere there’s a part of his brain that can do this. Apparently it’s decided to take a vacation. Probably to Montego fucking Bay.

Alyssa in her barista apron comes up to take away his empty mug while he’s staring down at the napkin like it's personally offended him.  
  
“Working on anything good today, Ruben?”  
  
“Budget,” he says, shortly. Alyssa studies his situation, his tight downturned lips and the way he’s frustratedly pressed the pen so hard into the napkin it’s torn.  
  
“Need some help? I spend all day with tips, got pretty good with finances.”  
  
_No,_ he wants to say. _It’s barely even finances, it’s a fucking simple addition-subtraction thing. I was top of math class all through school, I killed it on college papers that other students_ ** _cried_** _at.  
  
_ He nods his head, feeling tears welling in his eyes a little, like a kid struggling with his homework.  
  
“Hey now, none of that!” chides Alyssa, reassuringly. “Math is tricky stuff. My older brother always struggles with shit like this too, but damn, can that boy write poetry. Everyone’s got their thing, you know?”  
  
_I’ve got a fucking doctorate!_ Ruben wants to shout. _This_ _is what I’m good at! This is the only thing I’m good at!_  
  
It doesn’t take two minutes for Alyssa to figure out that as long as he sticks to budget with everything else, Ruben should be able to afford his shoes by market day the Saturday after next.  
  
Ruben grinds out a thanks, tallies another checkmark in the People Helping Ruben column. Maybe he can’t do a simple goddamn equation any more, but even so he can see he’s not pulling equal weight with anyone round here. There’s nothing he can offer them in return.

Really he knows that he’s just depleted. Too hungry, too tired, too messed up. That he just need to keep going, trust his synapses to rebuild their connections when they’re good and ready to start refiring down old paths. That trauma can impact on cognitive functioning.

He knows this, in the sense that this is something he has read about before. What he _believes,_ in the raw, exposed emotion of his loudest thoughts, is that his intelligence is the only thing of his that’s ever been worth very much about him, and now he doesn’t even have that. Jason would've discarded this Ruben in half a heartbeat.

Looks like Ian knew what he was about. Didn’t even need to kill him to delete those mental files he was so concerned about.

(He doesn’t know how long it had taken Ian to drive from the warehouse to the clinic at Alligator Pond.  
  
Ian had torched Ruben’s clothes on the concrete floor before they left while Ruben lay semi-vacant and sightless in a blood-streaked heap behind him. Sensory fragments crept in, which he observed absently from somewhere dark and far away. Smoke. His trembling amplified as a quiet series of vibrations against the table. Burning wetness across his body in neat and vibrant lines.

“Counting yourself yourself lucky you’re not on the bonfire too, Ruby Tuesday?” said Ian. “Don’t say I never do anything for you.”

A series of staccato overwrought breaths that didnt fill his airless lungs.

“Oh, the drama. Well! Time to pack up and roll out. I suppose you expect me to carry you to the car, too? And you’re the one who’s been lying down this whole time, Rubes, I do all work round here.”  
  
A pair of arms lifting him like he weighed nothing.

The outside air and change of view brought Ruben back to himself a little. It hurt like _fuck_. Ian threw him unceremoniously into the back of the rental and slammed the door. Ruben twisted in the seat, every position pulling something open to sting anew. The pained, panicked noises he was making pretty much obliterated any fragment of dignity he might’ve still had, but once he started they just kept coming and coming, uncontrollable high-pitched little mewling sounds and gasps.

Ian didn’t turn the music on this time. Ruben listened to his own whimpers the whole way to the clinic.)

 

_***_

 

_Jamaica, week 9.  
_

A routine is supposedly the best way to establish a healthy sleep cycle. Ruben hasn’t actually reached that part quite yet, but the routine itself becomes almost like rest.  
  
He finishes his shift, he showers in his little cupboard-sized en-suite wetroom.  
  
(One sleeve off and tug the shirt to one side, cleaning his tattered skin as fast as possible. Scrubs a little too hard so as not to wake the ghost of those light, light fingers skimming across his chest counterpoint to a blade. Dry off on the ratty-edged hotel-issue towel. Arm back in the shirt, repeat on the other side. Washes his legs while in his boxers then pulls them down to his thighs to deal with his junk and get covered up again as fast as possible. He's got no idea what’s going on with _that_ whole thing. Ian never touched him there, like that, really he shouldn’t have a problem with anything waist-down but he just…can’t. Leans over with his head tipped forward to wash his hair.  
  
It’s a fucking painstaking process and the bathroom is too small for all this maneuvering and honestly he’s really just sick of it, but he can’t bring himself to be exposed even when there’s nobody to see. He changes into pajamas like a shy kid in gym class, puts shirt on over his now-damp day clothes before performing some complicated wriggling around to make the switch. It’s easier now his stitches are out.)  
  
He makes his tea.

(He pays Cleo to pick up some for him along with her own supply, though he could get it himself. But they always share a cup when he comes along to collect, and Cleo doesn’t mind the fact that he talks to baby Tariq more than directly to her. She just smiles and addresses her comments to Tariq too, and they both nod seriously at his baby-babbles, giving thoughtful responses like a very cogent point has just been made.)

He checks the leaves and soil of the hanging plant in the corner of the room.  
  
(Guests leave some weird shit behind. He’s grown to enjoy the regular little gathering of staff calling dibs on worthwhile stuff, or laughing over ridiculous clothes or smutty paperbacks. This week, a potted plant in a hanging basket vined with deep, pointed emerald leaves and tiny white dots of flowers. Nobody else seemed interested: Ruben fell in love immediately, affixing it to swing from the curtain rail and religiously monitoring its status. He turns each individual leaf over in his fingers to check for dehydration or mold, and it fills him with a strange, sweet ache to see that it's healthy and flourishing in his care.)  
  
He draws meaningless little pictures in a notebook.  
  
(Leaves and flowers and geometric nothings.He can’t work - well, he has no work to do anyway, but even just trying to refresh basic scientific knowledge sends something in him skittering off on a worried little frenzy about kill-drugs and titanium chips and ketamine-mdma fusions. If he does nothing at all he finds his fingers absently drifting to his chest to read over his healing scars like braille, which only bums him out. The thoughtless swirl of pen over paper is nice, he’s even getting better at drawing. He tears his favorites out to pin them to his wall.)

This until it’s either late enough to just start his day, or until his body gives in and forces him to sleep.

 

***

 

 _Jamaica, week 10.  
  
_ They don't get too much tourist traffic through Alligator Pond. It’s a pretty little weatherbeat beach village, too practical and too far off any flight paths for major tourism. The hotel is mostly families of local folk, workers, long-term sort-of-renters. Still, people pass through every so often, mostly on their way to somewhere else. Today: a cute and chubby Latina girl, long haired with a big bright smile, dude who’s either her boyfriend or brother quiet by her side.  
  
Ruben’s manning the reception desk while Marcus gets his pre-shift caffeine fix. The girl is chattering away to her companion with Puerto Rican-American accented Spanish that yanks a thread of yearning in Ruben, and he can’t resist giving the greeting spiel in the same language.  
  
Both of the guests look delighted and make small talk that fills part of a gap Ruben hadn’t even noticed. There’s no Latino community here, and he doesn’t just miss his family, he misses his _culture_.  
  
He’s feeling something like contentment till she pauses mid-sentence and looks him over.  
  
“ _You look so familiar_ ,” she says. “ _Can’t place it_.”  
  
“ _Just one of those faces,_ ” he replies, putting the keys on the counter and shoving them over so she can’t see how unsteady his hands suddenly are.  
  
Probably nothing. Probably he does just have one of those faces, but it preys on his mind all night. First thing the next day he goes to a tiny internet cafe down the street, orders a coffee and takes it over to a console tucked in the corner where nobody can look over his shoulder.  
  
It takes a few deep breaths before he can bring himself to type ‘Ruben Marcado’ into Google, feeling like someone’s going to descend from the ceiling and pin him down as soon as he hits ‘enter’.  
  
First hit, his Facebook page, probably a virtual wasteland by now. And there below it, a number of headlines and fragments of articles dating more than a month back, variations on a theme:  
  
**_Authorities call off investigation into chemist suspected murdered in Jamaica  
_**_A spokesperson for the FBI today issued a statement that with no further leads on missing Philadelphia scientist Dr Ruben Marcado, they would be-  
  
_ He clicks on the full article and then his hand flies to his mouth to muffle the strangled noise he makes when the picture loads.  
  
On the left, a version of Ruben he’d almost forgot once existed, the old one from his hospital ID with that soft-eyed smile he used to be so good at.  
  
On the right, it’s _him._ Ian. Jason. Whoever. Staring out from a nondescript background, expressionless, looking straight at Ruben’s eyes.  
  
Ruben closes the tab as fast as he can with his heart hammering, deletes the browser history, walks calmly out of the cafe and spends the next half an hour violently vomiting in a closed-off alley.

 

***  


 

_Jamaica, week 11._  


The photo, the article, Ian, all play on his mind for days, lurking around while he tries to eat and tries to sleep and while he tries to hold conversations with people in the hotel. 

It’s worst when he works, and he keeps losing time obsessively wiping the same patch of window or wall over and over as his thoughts wind all around in perpetual steps like an Escher staircase. Halfway through showering one day he realises that he’d cleaned the bathrooms, the windows, the lockbox with the gun, and not once thought about how easy it would be to die. He was too distracted.   
  
Hard to tell if this counts as progress, really.

Had Ian been arrested - had Jason been arrested? He could go back and look but the idea of seeing that picture again, seeing that face again - Ruben’s stomach spasms painfully and he breathes deeply through his nose, puts the kettle on to boil just for something to do. If Jason was arrested, should Ruben try to help?  
  
Everyone thinks he’s dead, he knows that for sure.  
  
Ian knows that he isn’t.  
  
If Ian is in jail, then could Ruben go home? But if Ruben goes home then Ian can’t exactly be held responsible for his murder. Still, he probably makes a pretty convincing case for assault without even having to say a word. Is it right to let Jason be punished for Ian's crimes?  
  
What would he do if he did go back? Would he work at the hospital, in the lab where he made Jason’s drug, encased in walls that he was thrown into and pinned against?. The elevator, the basement, everywhere that Jason, that Ian left memories for Ruben to snag himself on like loose nails?  
  
What would his mom say when she saw how little of him is left? God, he misses her so much. He wishes he could just call her and hear her voice.  
  
He looks around his room like he’s not seen it for weeks. The tea-strainer on the table next to his old red kettle, next to the packages of tea that Cleo gave to him. At some point he’d got annoyed tripping over trash bags full of clothes and put everything into the drawers and the wardrobe, a little less like he was always halfway packed to leave. His drawings on the wall, the plant trailing its dark fronds in the window.His notebook. A baseball that him and Marcus sometimes toss across reception to pass the time, a smudgy mess of colour on a folded piece of card lovingly fingerpainted by baby Tariq.  
  
Would he go back to America?  
  
He doesn’t come up with an answer.

 

***  


 

 _Jamaica, week 12._  
  
There’s a knock on his door and a voice calling out “it’s just me!”  
  
Ruben unlocks the door to let Marcus in with a “hey, man,” and Marcus nods distractedly, perching on the edge of the table.  
  
“Hey, so look, I dunno if you’re gonna like what I have to tell you …”

Ruben feels his shoulders rise, feels everything tense. He pulls out a button-down from the drawer and holds it in his hands with a vice-grip. “What? What’s happened?”  
  
“So, you know my cousin Livia?”

Yeah. Ruben knows Livia. Livia’s a tall broad shouldered girl with weary, sweet eyes and Livia was first shift nurse at the Alligator Pond clinic a few months back, walking up with keys jingling as the sun rose onlyto find Ruben rent and ripped apart waiting on the doorstep. She closed up his wounds, and later she slid a packet of saltines into his hand even though she had more important things to be dealing with than being on snack duty.  
  
“Mhm,” he says, neutrally, slipping the shirt on over the top of his current one.  
  
“She…she said there was someone came into the clinic today. American. Generic pretty white-boy type, asking if anyone had news about his friend.”  
  
No. He can’t - _no_.  
  
“ _What_?” Ruben whispers.  
  
“Yeah. Lookin’ for a ‘little latino guy, might be going by Richard, or-‘” Marcus’s eyes flick towards him, apologetic. “‘Or Ruben, or something like that’.”  
  
Oh, _god_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [a/n: oops!  
> come tumblr with me at thisstableground and tell me your soft ruben thoughts so i can feel less guilty for unintentionally adding to the shitheap that is his life]


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [a/n: again, this is an AU from Ruben’s last scene on the show. PLEASE NOTE this means it diverges before the scene where Jason receives Ruben’s notebook through the mail, thats vital info
> 
> as always i know fuckall about anything
> 
> content warnings from chapter 1 still apply, plus more for this chapter specifically that i'll add on the end notes in case you prefer to check there first.]

_Jamaica, week 12, day 1._

This is what drowning feels like, deeper under with every breath.  
  
“What did she tell him?” he chokes out.

“Said it didn’t sound like anyone she knew, obviously.”  
  
Jesus. The things that people do for him, over and over again. “She shouldn’t have lied to him. He hates that. She doesn’t know what he can do.”  
  
“Livia’s a nurse, Ruben, you realise they sometimes do more than just give you a bandaid and send you home? She’s played gatekeeper against abusive partners more times than you know.”  
  
Everything about that nauseates him. “Not my partner.”  
  
“Well, or whoever. Look, none of us knows why you’re here, none of us knows what happened.” At this, Marcus glances at Ruben’s covered arms then guiltily averts his gaze. “But Livia remembers you, of course she does. And she said this dude looked like trouble, and seems like she was right else you wouldn’t be all like this. Nobody’s gonna just sell you out to him, you know that, right?”  
  
There’s too much to deal with. People are trying to keep Ruben safe and he doesn’t know why, people are trying to keep Ruben safe and he’s just not safe at all. Alligator Pond is a tiny fishing settlement. How long does it take to scour the town? How long til someone says, _oh, the guy at the hotel_ without even knowing what they’ve done?

“She also said he gave her this,” Marcus passes over a thin piece of card with a number scrawled in sharpie. “In case she heard anythin’. About you. She didn’t want to keep it.”

Ruben flips the card round and round in his fingers without feeling it. This is what drowning feels like, his hands are numb, his brain is dead weight rattling his skull, but there’s a caustic sear in his chest so sharp that he thinks he sort of knows what it would’ve been like if he had given up and drank that Windex.   
  
All of which indicates this: Ruben is going to freak. The fuck. Out.

“I need you to leave, Marcus,” he says through gritted teeth. “I really need you to leave me alone right now.”  
  
“Ruben-“ Marcus takes a step towards him. The gasp that tears into a place deep inside him is rasping and unnatural, he nearly loses his balance as he tries to get to the wall, tries to keep his back covered. Marcus steps back quickly, says something that Ruben can’t hear because he's sinking underwater, yelling as he goes.

“i’m not _kidding_ , Marcus, get out, get the hell out of my room!”  
  
A regretful voice, a door closing. Ruben can sink now and he does, he’s on the ground with his arms around his head, feet scrabbling at the floor as he tries to push further back into the wall.

He’s been using his real name. He stayed right where Ian left him, he used his real name.

In one mind or another they own him in fragments. Jason took his work and his smarts and his loyalty, Ian took his home and his body and the clothes off his back. There’s almost nothing of who he was before, but Ruben had thought, damned if he wouldn’t keep his name, make it mean something new that doesn’t belong to anyone else at all.

Stupid, he’s so fucking _stupid_.

***

_Jamaica, week 12, day 2._

God forbid he ever tries to do anything but live in circles, because first Ian’s come back into his life for a second try (can’t be Jason, because Jason doesn’t know about the warehouse, about Alligator Pond), and now Ruben’s once more in a payphone booth at four in the morning, not dialling a number.

He stares at the little square of card in his hand. Spent all day hiding his room, spent his whole shift looking over his shoulder. This is the worst idea. This is a mistake. He could hide for however long it takes, could even probably catch a ride with one of the transient regulars going in and out of town, wait it out, come back or keep moving, keep going on forever.

Ian would keep asking. Ian would keep looking. Sooner or later, one too many people are gonna lie to Ian on Ruben's behalf, and who ends up under the knife next time? At least Ruben’s pretty much pre-perforated, nothing to spoil, just tear along the dotted lines.  
  
Deep breath, put the change in, dial the number.  
  
It’s not until he hears what’s unmistakably Ian’s brusque “Yeah?” on the other end that he realises there’d been a tiny part of him still praying that somehow Jason was the one who had found him. A noise escapes him before he has time to hang up.  
  
“Well, now!” Ian sounds delighted. “I’d recognise that dulcet whimper anywhere, Rubes, how ya been, man?”  
  
Ruben smashes the receiver back into place and leans on it with all his weight.  
  
Then he bolts, takes off running back to the hotel.  
  
This was a mistake, this was a mistake.  
  
  
***  
  
_Jamaica, week 12, day 3._

He’s coming off shift in a post-paranoia funk, even more jumpy than yesterday and so exhausted he’s barely looking where he’s going. So it’s not until he’s fumbling his keys into the lock that he notices anything, not until a hand comes out from behind him to land splayed on the door, an arm almost brushing his face. He startles, then closes his eyes, resigned.  
  
“Miss me?” says Ian, low and amused close behind him.  
  
Ruben lets out a sobbing laugh and opens the door with a ‘come on in’ gesture. It doesn’t even seem worth it to panic. It just seems inevitable. He’s so tired.  
  
Ian casts an exaggerated appraising eye around the room while Ruben takes his thickest sweater out the drawer and pulls it over his head. Doesn’t help, he still feels flayed and naked. Ian flops comfortably on the edge of the bed like it’s his own, tests the busted springs a little with a disapproving nose-wrinkle. Ruben stands in the corner by the drawers, arms crossed.  
  
“Nice place. You draw all those?” Ian says, indicating the pictures on the wall. Ruben stays silent. “God, you’re rude. All this time and I don’t even get a hello?  
  
“I take it the chip worked,” Ruben says, tonelessly, ignoring Ian completely. “What metal did you end up using for the platform?”  
  
“Titanium, with a stainless 316 backing. Thank Jason for thinking that one up, real pity for him he never was all that good at covering his tracks. That’s more my gig.”  
  
Titanium and stainless steel, their minds had been working along similar lines of biocompatability then, Ruben thinks absently, though he can’t fathom the need for doubling up the materials. Essentially harmless, but totally unnecessary. It’s hardly like a chip in the brain needs the durability of a steel rod in the leg, is it? Then again, Ian’s nothing if not overkill personified.  
  
Ian cracks his knuckles casually. “So that’s the good news. I’ve not been that sour-faced son of a bitch for oh, two months now.”  
  
“I’m thrilled for you.”

Ian wags a finger at him. “Careful, I could almost have taken that as insincere, Rubinator, but here’s the bad news: I might not have to _be_ Jason, but he’s still there. And seems like the honeymoon’s wearing off ‘cause he’s getting restless and causing me all kinds of inconvenience. Sudden migraines, vision problems, dizziness, you get the drift. I can feel him just trying his best to claw at that switch and open his cage, Ruben, and I need someone with a pretty little brain like yours to figure out how to shut him up forever. I know you knew more than you were letting on.“  
  
Ruben thinks like he should maybe feel some kind of emotion about Jason, trapped in his own skull for months, essentially dead to the external world. Something they have in common. Pretty much all he feels is bitter.  
  
“You’re shit out of luck, Ian. Maybe you hadn’t noticed, but I’m not exactly a chemist any more. And if you think I’ve spent the past three months musing on your brain problems and not my own, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m hardly working full capacity right now.”  
  
He taps his head to illustrate. Probably shouldn’t admit that kind of vulnerability, but he’ll take looking weak over Ian thinking he can be of any use to him. It's a shame that Ian doesn’t take the slightest notice.  
  
“Flattering that I made such an impact, but you still have to do this.”  
  
Here's an interesting thing Ruben is learning: if you’re scared for long enough, fear stops being heart-shattering and starts being actually kinda tedious. Adrenaline is still screaming cacophonous through his veins, still telling him to pick fight or flight when he’s stuck on freeze. It’s just there’s also an overriding sense of _Christ, this_ ** _again_**?

“With what equipment, exactly? Even if I could in theory, there’s pretty limited scope for implementing a fix with, like, a tea strainer and a biro.”  
  
“Oh, that’s the good news,” says Ian, with a razorblade grin. “I’m changing the terms of our deal.”

And he pulls two plane tickets out of his coat pocket.  
  
What.  
  
“You can come back home, Ruben. You can get it all back. All I’m asking is for you to fix up these teeny-tiny barely noticeable performance issues. And, of course, to never tell anyone about me. Just two incredibly simple conditions and you get your old life, I get my new one, neither of us has to deal with Jason any more, everyone wins!” He contemplates for a moment. “Well, everyone apart from Jason, I guess.”  
  
Ruben thinks about seeing his mom, his family again, going back to the job he’d worked all his life to earn. His books, his laptop, his own clothes, the PR flag on the wall of his childhood bedroom. A therapist or several, definitely. Having enough money to live on.  
  
Ruben wants so much it makes him stumble, limp with defeat. Ian is smirking at him already.  
  
“No,” says Ruben, to both of their shock. For the first time since they met, Ian is briefly speechless. But Ruben committed to his answer the second it hit air, so he squares up, tries to look defiant even though his lip is kind of wobbling.

“ _Excuse_ me?”

“No. I’m not gonna. You come in here and think you can tempt me to get back into this whole clusterfuck by talking about _my old life_? I don’t get to go home. I don’t get my old life back. That’s gone now, you bled it out of me and it’s gone.” He’s spitting acid now, he’s reckless. “And actually, seeing as the majority of my old life was being the go-between for you and Jason, I don’t have a problem with that. Get another plaything, I’m done.”  


It’s no real surprise when he’s shoved face-first into the wall, Ian hissing fury. De ja vu.  
  
“Do you think I was fucking _asking_ , Ruben? Do you think this was a polite request? You’re doing this for me. You don’t have a choice. I could end you right now if I wanted to, don’t you forget that.”  
  
“Big deal,” Ruben shoots back. “Do it. Save me the effort later on.”  
  
Ian holds him against the wall in silence for seconds that stretch to forever, mulling it over. Then he flips Ruben to face him and gives him a soft, dangerous look. “Fine. Fine, Ruben. Killing you might not work, I can accept that. But oh, Rubes, don’t you know there’s a million ways to take someone to pieces? I barely scratched the surface last time. So to speak, haha.”  
  
Ian hooks his fingers just inside the waistline of Ruben’s too-big pants, his thumbs rubbing soft semicircles low on Ruben’s stomach, underneath his sweater.

“You don't have to like this at _all_ ,” Ian says sing-song in his ear. “That’s what makes it fun.”

_Fear gets kinda tedious_ , what was that? False bravado bullshit, he’s a fucking coward, constantly damming endless new wellsprings of terror while the infrastructure crumbles and floods around him. His doubletime heart is beating out _I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t want to_ , but when has what Ruben wants ever been a factor? 

He can’t move.

“You gonna be good, Ruben?” Ian murmurs, thumb ghosting over the button of Ruben’s fly. “The right answer is -“ then he bites off his words with a pained gasp, recoils, brow drawn tight and agonised. Migraine, dizziness, vision loss, that’s what he’d said.   
  
Move, now, _now!_

Ruben takes the split second of distraction to grab Ian by the hair and slam his face down hard into his knee. Ian crumples to the floor with a bloodied nose and Ruben on his back, frantically pulling Ian’s hands round to where they can’t be used them against him any more. No more, no more, he’s done. He blindly reaches into the drawer beside him, pulls out one of Mr Campbell’s old, sturdy leather belts and tightens it round Ian’s wrists.  
  
Cursing, Ian tries to throw his weight off, but he’s still squinting through maybe-broken nose and headache and he’s not on top form. Ruben has the upper hand. He gets another belt and drags Ian closer to the big exposed water pipe in the corner, looping the length of leather around and securing him in place.

Ruben sits back, breathing hard, disbelieving. Did that just happen, did he just do that? Ian jerks and growls and tries to yank his bindings loose. The belts are too thick, the pipe is too solid, he’s trapped. 

“You fucker,” he snarls, writhing. “You little _bitch_ , wait and see what I do to you. I’m going to take you apart from the inside out, Ruben, if you thought it was bad before you’ve got no idea what’s coming. You’re worthless, you’re nothing, and I won’t even let you die, I’m going to keep you forever and destroy you living.”  
  
“Man, shut up,” says Ruben. He doesn’t feel brave, tissue-paper voice thin and torn and dry, can’t stop the stinging lines of saltwater streaking down his face, but he is _not_ gonna be destroyed, he’s _not_ gonna be good. “You’re getting boring.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [warning: attempted sexual assault, the intent is pretty clear but it doesnt really get far at all]
> 
> [a/n: my whole heart and soul says 'let ruben be happy' and i dont know how this fic keeps going the way it does.
> 
> come to my tumblr at thisstableground and tell ruben nice things that he needs to hear, i'll pass the message along]


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [a/n: nebulous gasp of of science, legal procedures, science again, do no harm canon etc. sorry if the technobabble grates on anyone actually in these field, not sorry if rewriting the finale offends DNH fans because honestly
> 
> reminder again that this is TOTALLY DIVERGING from the original post-Ruben ending because fuck that]

_Jamaica, week 12, day 3._  
_Morning_  
  
There’s vile whispering like a vicious ghost is hanging out in the corner of Ruben’s room. Ruben doesn’t sleep all night, leaves the bare lightbulb blaring so he doesn’t have to sit in the dark while Ian tells him in a low tone all the things he’s gonna do to him once he gets free.  
  
He doodles in his notebook shakily, trying to figure out what his next move is. Everything is firing wildly in haphazard directions. Should he ask for help from one of the other residents? But that would put them into Ian’s firing line.  
  
Should he just…kill him? Even when it was a matter of a drug to switch him off, the dawning awareness back in that burger joint that he would technically be killing Ian had made him a little queasy. Anything he used here would be far less elegant, would take Jason out too, and besides, even after everything Ruben doesn’t think he’s a killer.  
  
If the headaches are linked to the switch then could that be used to his advantage again? But most of his victory was down to the element of surprise. With no way of finding out the actual cause of the headaches…  
  
A sudden lull in Ian’s quiet vitriol catches Ruben’s attention, and he looks over to see Ian slumped uncomfortably unconscious against the pipe. The clock blinks 7:25 in red. He just has time to think “well, that answers the timezone question”before Ian comes to with a pained grunt and looks wildly around, tugging at his bonds. He inhales like he’s about to shout. Because what Ruben really needs right now is to explain to his confused neighbors why there’s a yelling stranger belted to a pipe in his room first thing in the morning.  
  
“Please don’t,” says Ruben quickly. Ian - Jason? freezes.  
  
“Ruben?” There’s something in the way he says it. “What the - what? _Ruben_?”  
  
“Jason?”  
  
“Yeah. What - Where the fuck am I? What happened to Ian? Ow, Jesus, what happened to my nose? And what are you doing here? And…what?”

“Uhm,” says Ruben, faintly wrongfooted. If this is Ian making some kind of play, it’s a disorienting one. “You’re in Jamaica. I’m…assuming something fucked up with the switch and Ian’s gone back to sleep? I kind of kneed you in the face. I live here. And…that’s pretty much it.”  
  
There’s an awkward silence.  
  
“I thought you were dead,” Jason says finally.  
  
“I should be so lucky,” mutters Ruben. “You want tea?”

Jason makes a face. “No coffee?”  
  
“Sorry if my hospitality isn’t up to your standards,” says Ruben waspishly, grabbing his mug and rinsing it out in the basin. “I wasn’t expecting guests.”

“Are you going to untie me?” Jason asks, with that familiar juggernaut impatience that’s enough to convince Ruben he’s not faking. 

“Are you gonna tell me how you ended up stuck backstage at the Ian Price Show for two months?” Ruben retorts, but he goes to let him out anyway, moving warily like he’s unleashing a rabid dog and then scooting back as fast as possible to the far wall once Jason is free. Jason doesn’t yell “gotcha” and leap for his jugular immediately, so that’s a relief.  
  
“Two _months_ ‽” Jason demands, rolling out his shoulders with a wince and a cracking noise. Ruben nods confirmation, Jason sighs. “Well. We figured out the platform. Had everything set up, knew a guy who could make the chip, knew a guy who could put it in. Once I got out of jail -“  
  
“Wait, jail-?” Jason gives him a quelling look. He subsides. “Right, yes, we’ll get there. Carry on.”  
  
“Once I got out of jail, we were ready to go. But Ian had a backup.” Jason grimaces. “He’d got a sample of the suppressant. The one that made us cycle randomly, remember?  
  
Ruben remembers cowering in a closet, and a glass-paned door being smashed in with a bat at a point roughly where his head had been a few seconds before. Simpler times. “Yeah, vaguely.”  
  
“And…well, it’s kind of hazy after that. It was around the time when the surgery was due. He got one of those creeps he calls his  _connections_ to chain him up in the kitchen, I remember yelling at the guy to let me loose, but they must’ve had a code word. Seems like he was banking on a cycle coming just close enough to surgery time and convincing Dr Carmello - that’s the guy I had on the procedure, he knows the score - convince him that he was me, fix the switch while he was in control. I guess he got lucky, because here we are.”  
  
“Jesus.” Ruben can’t help but be a little impressed. “That was a serious gamble. I mean, timing aside, what if the suppressant had completely fucked with the drug, or the mechanism?”  
  
“Ian likes risk,” says Jason, in a dark tone. “It seems to pay off for him, more often than not.”  
  
***

_Noon  
_

Ruben opens the door cautiously on his way back to the room with lunch, almost expecting to be jumped. Jason is still himself, sat at the table with the plane tickets and two passports in front of him. He passes one to Ruben.  
  
“It was in my coat pocket,” he explains, taking the sandwich that Ruben offers.  
  
This is Ruben’s passport. He studies the picture of himself for a moment, then closes it and presses the edge to feel the pages flip past his thumb. It was in his own pocket, after the flight here. He doesn’t remember Ian taking this from him. Must’ve been while Ruben was out of it, after - nope, no, not that route, not right now. He clears his throat. “So. Jail? Why were you in jail? I mean, I’m not entirely surprised, all things considered, if anything I don’t know how it hasn’t happened sooner, but- um.”  
  
“Turns out following a guy to a different country and coming back alone after he disappears is pretty damning,” says Jason, dryly.  
  
That explains their pictures, side by side, on the article he never read properly. “Oh. So you were - that was me? Why’d they let you go?”  
  
“CCTV showing you passing by outside Montego airport, day after Ian flew back.” Ruben’s eyebrow scrunch together, bewildered.”Doctored. Obviously. Ian’s got a guy for _everything_.”

“What, and they actually _bought_ that?”  
  
“Looks like it. Must’ve been pretty airtight. So they let me go based that, plus lack of discernable motive. They were going the drug trade angle first, thought we might’ve been tied up some black market kind of dealings using work resources.”  
  
Ruben rolls his eyes. “Oh, sure, Latino chemist goes missing, immediately jump to drugs. They wouldn’t have said that if it was you who disappeared, y’know.”  
  
Jason shrugs like, _eh, what can you do_. “First they thought I’d killed you over business disagreements. Kind of makes sense, after the whole Ian fighting you in the lab incident. But they couldn’t find any evidence of anything much besides the fact we were both on the same plane, and there was the CCTV, so charges were dropped.”

Get away with murder, easy as that. Apparently Jason’s still coasting through any concerns surrounding medical malpractice and the fallout of Ian’s violent tendencies. Meanwhile, Ruben got written off as dead in Jamaica based solely on a fake tape Ian commissioned from his faction of weirdly resourceful fucked-up friends. Way of the world.

“Wait, so if I fly back home not only do I have to try and explain to passport control that I’m not dead, but also that I’m not part of the international drug trade?” 

“Only the dead part, as far as I know, but all this was going on just before the surgery so I don’t know if anything’s happened since then. But no, I dropped some vague lines about you getting anonymous threats about marketing Blackout, said I was gonna go to Jamaica with you to make it look like a work thing before you hid out for a while to throw off whoever was on your case.” Jason is remarkably cavalier about admitting to perjury.“Ian covered his tracks well enough that they eventually decided it _was_ probably someone out to steal your work and make a profit, and then they closed up the case when they couldn't find your body.”  
  
“Okay.” It’s incredibly unsettling, hearing details about his own murder investigation. “And you didn’t want to look any harder into whether your alternate personality killed me, maybe?”  
  
“The police were already on my ass,” Jason says, defensive. “I couldn't risk getting involved, it’d draw too much attention.”  
  
“Great,” says Ruben, sourly. “Good talk. Glad to know you cared.”  
  
“Ruben -“  
  
“I’m tired,” Ruben cuts in. “I’ve been awake for two nights straight, and I had a busy evening with your other half last night. What’s going to happen now is, _I_ am gonna sleep. _You_ are gonna be belted back to that pipe, so I’d recommend any bathroom breaks be taken now. I’ll wake up a bit before 8:25 Eastern time and…I guess we’ll just see what happens.”  
  
“Is it really necessary to tie me back up?”  
  
“We don’t know what your transitions are doing, if they’re stable. Do you think I want to wake up to Ian looming over me?” Jason inclines his head in a _fair enough_ gesture. Ruben takes a little pity. “Here, you can have my pillow to sit on. First class treatment, Ruben-style.”  
  
Once Jason is secured in as comfortable a position as possible, Ruben triple checks the bindings for security. Then he sets the digital alarm for 19:00 hours, and is unconscious almost as soon as he lies down.  
  
***

_Evening_

He wakes up to beeping at seven in the evening, 8pm Philly time, and blearily stumbles to let Jason shake out his probably-cramping limbs, use the bathroom and sip some water. By the time he’s fixed back to the pipe the clock says 7:23.  
  
The next two minutes go by with increasing tension. Neither of them speaks.  
  
As the 4 clicks into a 5, they brace themselves.  
  
Nothing happens.  
  
“Huh,” says Ruben.  
  
They wait until another ten minutes has passed, just to be certain, but eventually it seems safe to let Jason free again.  
  
Jason breathesan exhale of relief. “Not that I’m not happy, but what the hell’s going on? Does that mean…what, I’m back? Is it permanent?”

“I’d say it seems like…I dunno, like someone’s finger slipped off the button just long enough for you slide in, and they shut it back off with you on the wrong side. Or the right side, from this perspective, I guess.”  
  
“Makes sense, but how has that happened? How do I know if it’ll stick?  
  
Ruben shrugs. “Jason, I’ve had other things on my mind, I don't really know any of what’s going on with your whole deal any more.”  
  
“Okay. But what, could it be the drug, the delivery mechanism? In theory, what do you think?”  
  
Christ. Ruben may as well be communicating through a dog-whistle for all his words seem to register.  
  
“Fine. I can’t say anything for sure, and I don’t even know if I know this shit any more,” he sighs. “If you’re gonna push me, I’d tell you I’m confident it’s not the drug.“

He might’ve lost his mojo now, but he doesn’t think it’s arrogant to say that at least once, he was pretty much unparalleled in some things. Balancing his workload and Jason’s projects alone would’ve been considered an impressive feat, even without the advances he achieved while doing them. He trusts his skills on that drug.

“The switch, then, is that what you’re saying?”  
  
“What I’m saying, Jason, is that I have no fucking clue because nobody has ever dealt with this problem before.” Jason looks petulant but Ruben holds up a hand to stall whatever complaint is on his tongue. He’s got something, there’s something familiar about the rising static in his thoughts, the moment just before indistinct images coalesce into insight.

Leave it to Jason to _aggravate_ him back en route to scientific thought.

“But…” he says slowly, and Jason perks up. “And this is a complete shot in the dark, not that you ever seemed bothered by that before - I’d say it’s deterioration. Plain and simple. Your switch is corroded.”  
  
Jason frowns “How? We use stainless and titanium all the time in the body, there’s no reason for them to deteriorate so quickly. They’re inert, they’re biocompatible-“  
  
“We use them all the time for fake knees and pacemakers, Jason, I’d think you’d have realised by now that this sort of thing is pretty fucking specific. I mean, we use painkillers all the time but you’re not gonna shove an ibuprofen into your amygdala and hope it keeps Ian at bay. It’s an entirely different set of problems and causes and variables.” Exasperation feels like it’s calling in long-distance from a version of Ruben still back in his lab. “The platform materials were likely options based on some very tangentially related evidence, an educated guess at best. Everything we’ve been doing is completely unprecedented.”  
  
Ruben’s pacing the room now, forgotten the three-month mental block, forgotten everything but the need to chase the thread and pull till an answer came through.

“My guess is that the conditions were hostile to the metal. Could be the brain, or your _specific_ and, no offence, very abnormal brain. Could be the drug, or interference from the suppressant Ian took. You’d have maybe been fine with using just one metal for the platform, though nothing too risky combining passive stainless next to titanium. But if something broke down the oxide layer on the stainless, and it's not unthinkable that it might, that alone is gonna cause reliability issues. Then you’ve gotta think, well, now it’s active stainless, that's shifting _way_ up the galvanic series from titanium. Two dissimilar metals hanging out in close quarters, boom, prime candidate for even more accelerated corrosion.”

He’s almost breathless by the end of it. Jason’s nodding along. Hard to remember that they’re not just in the lab, thrilling at testing the limits of scientific knowledge. Or that the lab is where this whole disastrous chain began unfolding in the first place. It feels too good to think, it feels good to talk shop. 

“That’d explain the performance problems,” says Jason. “But what about the headaches and everything? Is that just a result of the transition reacting to a halfway-tripped switch, or is it a symptom of…well, whatever happens when you’ve got corroding metal in your brain?”

“Sounds like bad news for you either way, but I wouldn’t want to make a judgement without running some tests. I don’t know _why_ you didn’t just use titanium on its own, that would’ve been far less risky, and way easier besides. And don’t take any of this as gospel, it’s just one possibility.”  
  
Epiphany over, Ruben sits down heavily on the bed. It’s so, so good to know he’s not completely lost his skills, but used to be when he’d fly through a realisation like this, seven others would spark off and he could run for days just jumping from thread to thread like parkour. Now he’s had one pretty basic revelation and he’s exhausted.  
  
Jason’s too psyched to notice. “Right, right. Still, this is great stuff, real progress. We can fly back tomorrow on Ian’s tickets, get to work straight away-“  
  
Uh, what now? “Hold up, hold up, ‘we’?”

Imagine flying back to America, sitting next to _him_ on a plane, never quite knowing if the switch was gonna trip again.  
  
“Well, yeah,” says Jason, like there’s no question about it. “I can’t exactly manufacture the replacement, can I? This isn’t my field.”

"No, but any single one of the techs in my lab could. Get whoever did it last time on the case, make up some reason if you have to, you should be used to lying by now. You might need me for the theoretical but I’m not gonna bring anything to the table you can’t find elsewhere for this next part."  
  
Imagine walking back into the lab, Jason standing behind him, hurrying him along, watching him. Keeping Jason’s secrets. Everyone he used to work with knowing he’s different now, speaking too carefully or prodding too hard, seeing all the lines he shattered along.  
  
“I don’t trust any of them with it. And the more people I tell, the more I risk my secret getting out.”  
  
“I can’t get involved in this again, Jason. I won’t.”  
  
Imagine the media picking up on the story that the chemist everyone thought was dead came back, on the same flight as the guy once accused of killing him no less. Journalists outside his door, inside his personal space. Every newspaper stand or overheard news bulletin a risk of seeing his own face, hearing all the details about the dissection of his own body, his life left naked for public consumption.

“I don’t wanna get anyone else involved. Rubes, it’s the only way, you _have_ to do this.  
  
Imagine leaving the airport with whoever’s wearing Jason’s face at the time and getting into a car with him. Imagine him driving - would there be a distorted jazz cassette tape in the background or worse, just silence cut with sobbing, Ruben doesn’t know where they’re going, there’s blood on the backseat and the door is locked and it never matters what he wants, he has to -

“Ruben?”  
_  
Oh, I’m hyperventilating_ , he notes, somewhere in the back of his mind.

“Hey.” Jason puts a hand on his shoulder, Ruben knocks it away with a strangled “no!” and pulls the collar of his shirt up to hide his face. “Hey, come on, it’s just me. It’s Jason. Ian’s not here.”  


_That_ anchors him. He lets the shirt drop so he can glare.  
  
“It’s just you?” Ruben says, incredulous, hysterical, his voice gunshot-loud and shrill. “Just you, Jason‽ Is that supposed to be _comforting_? Remind me, who came into my lab and took over my life? Who manipulated me and stole every spare moment of my time and told me I still wasn’t doing enough? Who never once tried to stop dragging me back into this godforsaken rabbit-hole over and over? Stay here for eight more hours, Ruben! You’ve still got time, Ruben! I fucking know Ian isn’t here. Ian’s not the goddamn problem right now!”  
  
“Rubes…” Jason reaches out again. Ruben dodges his grasp.  
  
“Don’t _touch_ me! And don’t fucking call me that. _Listen_ to me. I was loyal to you from the second you asked for my help and you didnt give me shit in return. What the hell was I worth to you? What the hell did I get from you, after everything I did? Christ, even Ian at least bought me a burger once, and he’s the one who did this to me!” Ruben gestures at his chest, wild and raging.  
  
“Did what to you?” Jason’s voice is quiet, subdued.

“What?”  
  
“I-“ Jason clears his throat. “I…don’t remember anything he does, he let me think you were dead. I don’t actually know what happened, Ruben, what _did_ he do to you?”  
  
Ruben hesitates for maybe half a second, before something vindictive and vengeful makes him roll his sleeves, yank his shirt up, closely watching horror creep in on Jason’s face. He wants Jason to know, wants Jason to feel even a little bit of what he’s been carrying everywhere for three months.  
  
“Oh my god,” Jason whispers.  
  
Ruben straightens his clothing and its like snapping down a shutter, the moment of self-assured fury gone tracelessly. He just feels small and sad again. It hurts to look Jason’s face, so he closes his eyes as he stammers through an explanation.  
  
“He was on the plane. He knew- knew everything. I…he drove us, there was a-a-a warehouse, and he had a knife, he had a gun, and told me to- he m-m-made me-” it’s been trapped in his head so long he doesn’t know how to make it come out clearly, really doesn’t want to use the words. “He had a knife. H-he burnt my clothes. Said I’d better stay as good as dead t-to anyone back home.”  
  
He breathes ragged and then adds quietly, “it hurt so _much_.”  
  
Jason is sheet-white, one hand covering his mouth. “I’m so, so sorry, God, fuck, I’m so sorry, Ruben. It was Ian, you have to know I’d never…I’d _never_ -“  
  
Anger flares up again: Ruben’s flickering through moods like an old-school slideshow today. “You’d never _what_ , Jason? Never drain me of everything I can give and then throw me aside when you’re done? Never leave me bleeding while you go off chasing your own needs? Never come crashing back into my life like an avalanche as soon as I’ve got something you want? Yeah, you’re right, doesn’t sound like you at all.”  
  
“I-“  
  
“Save it,” snaps Ruben. “You never gave a damn about me, I can see that now. Ian’s the bad guy, right? Ha. You’re just two different brands of asshole. I should’ve cut you out of my life years ago.”  
  
Jason is silent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [come talk to me about what a jerk doctor jerk doctor jason is at thisstableground on tumblr.]


	5. Chapter 5

_Jamaica, week 12, days 3 and 4_

There’s nothing left to say: they move cautiously round the confined space of Ruben’s room like repelling magnets, pretending not to see each other until it’s time for Ruben’s shift. It’s such a relief to escape the aching tension between them that he doesn’t even feel the fatigue clinging to his bones, cleaning bedrooms and bathrooms and walls and windows with no thoughts at all running through his head.  
  
Jason is thankfully still the one in his body when Ruben returns, and Ruben lets him take the bed for the night. He rests his own head on his folded arms at the table, phasing in and out of uncomfortable half-sleep until Jason wakes the next morning. Transition time passes uneventfully, the switch secure for the moment, and so Jason gets ready to drive back to Montego for his flight, to put into action the solution they'd found the night before. Ruben isn’t exactly sorry to see him go, but his anger has quieted if only temporarily and this feels like a conclusion he thought he’d already come to months ago, a kind of melancholy finiteness.  
  
Jason finally breaks the silence as they stand out front of the hotel. “What are you gonna do once I leave?”

Good question. It takes Ruben a moment to think of an answer. “We still have no reliable data on when you might switch. I think I’m gonna catch a ride out of town, stay on the move and off the radar until the surgery’s over. Get some sightseeing in, why the hell not? I don't have a phone any more, but I can access my email from a cafe, you can contact me at my usual account when it’s done. I’ll come back here once it’s safe.”

Jason gives him a long level look, then pulls out his wallet and hands Ruben a thick stack of Jamaican dollars.

Ruben blinks and doesn’t take it. “You don’t have to-“

“I really kind of do,” Jason says, glancing around the porch of the hotel, of Ruben's new home with its paint-peeling walls and time-tattered outdoor furniture. “You’ve no guarantee of a job for the next few weeks if you’re on the move. If nothing else consider it your wages for all the extra hours at the lab.”  
  
“Oh.” Ruben takes the money and flicks it through his fingers. “In that case, you’ve seriously underpaid me.”  
  
Jason laughs, then sobers fast. “You’re really not coming back to America? At all?”  
  
“Not now. Not yet. I mean, I don’t want to be a cleaner forever. And I’ve got my family there. But I need some time, and until Ian’s gone, I don’t even want to be in the same country as you, never mind the city.’ He waves off Jason’s attempt to interrupt. ‘No, I know what I’m doing. Look, I’m not ever coming back to a lab with you, no matter what. But if there are complications with the switch later on, send me an email and I’ll do what I can to find a fix from a distance.”  
  
“Thank you,” says Jason. “You don't know how much that means to me.”  
  
“I’m not doing it for you,” says Ruben, though if he’s being honest he’s as susceptible as ever to the burst of pride in his chest at Jason’s rarely-given gratitude. “I’m doing it for my safety. If there’s even the slightest hint that Ian could come back, I need you to let me know so I can get the hell out of town.”  
  
Jason looks conflicted, but he only says “yeah. Yeah, you’re right. And Ruben…I really am sorry. For everything.”  
  
“Goodbye, Jason.”  
  
Jason climbs into the rental car that Ian had parked out front the night he arrived. Ruben stands on the porch watching Jason leave his life, dizzy in the bright morning sun.

***

 

Cleo finds him still there about half an hour later. He’s sort of forgotten how to move. He blinks at her with round, confused eyes. It’s been a long day. Long few months.

“Oh, Ruben,” she sighs. Baby Tariq tugs on one of her dreads and puts it in his mouth. She pulls it out absent-mindedly and shifts the canvas bag of groceries dangling over one arm. “Come to my place? You look like you need some company.”

He sits at one of the wooden chairs by Cleo’s tiny little table and she deposits Tariq in his lap as she busies herself finding mugs, spoon, water. Tariq watches with fascination as Ruben pulls his notebook out of his pocket and starts drawing silly little cartoons. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Cleo studying his face.  
  
“Will you ever tell us what it is that brought you here, Ruben?”

His throat closes up. “Maybe some day.”  
  
“But not today?”  
  
“No. Not today. Not yet.”

She nods and leaves it at that. But he thinks of all the people doing all the little things that kept him somewhere close to sane this past while, in this quiet little beachside town, and he thinks _fuck it_. He’s already done this once for Jason, who had no right to his trust in the first place, and he knows everyone already knows in a rumored, guesswork sort of way.

So he shifts Tariq to the side and rolls one sleeve up, to the elbow. 

Cleo acts casual but he can see the tiny flare of shock. Knowing isn’t the same as seeing. “Are those-“ she gestures with a vague circle in the air around his arms and chest.

“All over? Yeah,” he says, tiredly. “A leaving present from my ride here."

With a hum of acknowledgement, Cleo turns away to pour the water like he’d just told her his ride here bought him a shirt or a keyring. Tariq smacks one tiny hand into Ruben's bare arm gleefully and points at the notebook with a string of chattered nonsense, a clear “hey, we were in the middle of something”. Ruben pulls his sleeve back down and gets back to work.

“Did I ever show you my tattoo?” Cleo asks, bringing the tea to the table. She sets the mugs down, and lifts her t-shirt to show a snaking series of patterns reaching up either side of her stomach like intricate braids. It’s meticulously detailed, some lines blocky and bold and others delicate, barely-there strokes. They all converge around a centre just below her navel, around a large, slender-fingered outline of a hand, echoed with a much smaller, chubbier handprint nestled in its palm.

‘It’s very beautiful,’ Ruben says. It really is.

“Yes, but see,” Cleo says, running a finger over one woven line. Looking closer, Ruben can see that parts of her dark skin between the black ink are puckered in a series of discolored, pitted lines.

“Stretchmarks,” Cleo explains, as she sits opposite Ruben. “My sister told me it was vain to cover them, that they’re the scars a mother should wear proudly to show what she has overcome for the sake of her child. But…I had an incredibly difficult pregnancy. I was very unwell, nearly lost the baby. The father left, which was probably for the best, but it meant there was no money. My family don’t live nearby. I would have been homeless, if not for Mrs Campbell drafting up a payment plan that meant I could stay here. It was a rough time.”  
  
“Cleo-“ he starts, guiltily. He hadn’t known any of this, has had too much going on to learn a lot about the people around him. She just gives him that _you hush now_ look that’s definitely going to be the bane of Tariq’s life once he’s old enough to understand it.  
  
“I’m telling you this because I want you to know that I was never embarrassed of these marks. My sister was right, they are hard earned, and look at what a prize I got, too!” She crinkles her eyes lovingly in Tariq’s direction. “I’m happy to be where I am, with my Tariq, but the route here was very, very difficult, and the marks remind me too much of where I’ve already been, not where we’re going. I don't need to see the struggle every time I look in the mirror, right? So I got the tattoos.”  
  
She stands again to take the baby, who is making burbling sounds and grabby gestures towards her.

“I’m not saying, _go get a tattoo_ ,” she clarifies. “It’s not just the physical scars, I know. I just need you to hear that there’s nothing to be ashamed of about carrying battle wounds. But if they keep dragging you back to the war, then that is something that we need to try and change in some way, when you are ready to.”

The idea of letting someone come at him with a needle, letting them stand over him and puncture his bare skin makes Ruben run cold, but not nearly as much as he would’ve expected. He slides his hand up the opposite sleeve, runs a finger over one ridged, still-red line thoughtfully, just once. Not something he wants to think about today, not a decision he has to make yet. He’s got time.

“Drink your tea,” Cleo tells him.  
  
He curls his right hand around the warm ceramic, breathes in the scent. With his left hand, he turns over the page in his notebook filled with stick figures and bright smiling suns, and on a fresh sheet of paper starts doodling floppy petalled flowers and vining, twisting leaves.

***

He’s in a payphone booth at four in the afternoon, ready to dial a number, but he needs a second, he just needs a moment. The sun beams in, magnified through the plexiglass.

Okay.  


Deep breath, put the change in, dial the number.  
  
it rings for so long before someone answers.  
  
“Marcado residence, Estefanía speaking.”  
  
Over the past three months he’s thought a million times of what he’d say to her if he could. How he’d say that he loves her, that he was so scared without her, he wants to know all about his sisters and the family and hear her tell him he's working too hard, not eating enough. He wants to tell her that the only food he can stomach the idea of most days is her cooking.  
  
“ _Mom_ ,” is all he says instead.  
  
There’s a long and crackling silence.  
  
“Ruben?” comes the response, hushed and disbelieving.  
  
“ _Si, mamá_ , yeah. It’s me. It’s Ruben.”  
  
She’s yelling for his sisters to come quick, come quick, she’s talking a mile a minute in Spanish and for all he missed her voice he can’t process what she’s saying. He’s laughing, he’s sobbing, he can’t stop repeating himself: “it’s me. I’m here. I’m alive.”

 

[End.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [a/n: there we are, we made it! can't believe that the first multi-chaptered thing i’ve ever completed was for this fandom of all things, but hey, i like it.
> 
> i kind of dont want to end it but this seems like the best place to let ruben go do his own thing for a while. he’ll be okay. maybe i’ll do some oneshots in this verse some time if i have any inspiration.
> 
> shoutout to [this](https://thisstableground.tumblr.com/post/159050522216/ok-but-after-a-few-months-of-getting-used-to-his#notes) post and [this](https://thisstableground.tumblr.com/post/159052311736/schmoodles-so-im-still-rlly-liking-the-flower#notes) drawing for the lovely idea about tattoos, and shoutout to everyone who’s been yelling in my tumblr inbox while i’ve been posting this fic. its been a good time!
> 
> as ever i am hanging around tumblr at [thisstableground](https://thisstableground.tumblr.com/) where i will continue to cry about dr marcado forever
> 
> [a/n 2: bonus timestamp in the next chapter, if you wanted to check in and see how he's doing]


	6. Chapter 6

and a little something like an epilogue.

its been some time. he's doing well.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [an: the tea that the young lady with the baby gave to ruben is in fact exactly what i drink as a high-strung insomniac and it’s chill as fuck.]
> 
> [come hang out at thisstableground on tumblr where i'm apparently very easily goaded into writing things like whatever this is]


End file.
